Building Employee Engagement to Create Psychological Safety

Emotional safety and intelligence are now considered a major element of what makes businesses successful. Both employers and employees need to build a relationship based on trust and mutual benefit to get the maximum benefit from their working relationship. Without this, one or the other or even both will be undercutting the other and honestly, nobody wins in that game.

In the recent past, we’ve heard of solid layoffs workplace ghosting, and other underhanded tactics on the part of employers. Similarly, employees have also come up with things like coffee badging quitting, etc to compensate for what they feel is a lack of honesty with them.

Let’s be very clear about the situation – in none of these scenarios is anyone going to succeed and anything other than wasting their time and that of others. The need of the hour is not draconic and redundant control but engagement at all levels to foster actual growth and real business performance.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of the most useful ways both employers and employees can look towards giving more to their colleagues and supervisors and benefiting in return:

3 ways of boosting employee engagement to prevent workplace ghosting and quiet quitting

1 Developing authentic synergy

Key Takeaways:

• This success demands work by synergy and employee engagement, not disharmony and disengagement.

• companies that do not foster a healthy work culture end up losing business value on terms that they do not even recognize.

• Ensuring that your employees have psychological safety is the first step towards enabling them to put in their best work.

A competitive and dynamic team is based on the notion of every person adding a certain unique value to the equation. The idea here is that your colleagues acknowledge that you bring something special to the table and without you, they would be missing that asset. Now, in reality, it is possible that a lot of the work that any person does could be also done by others but that’s not the point.

The point is to have a company culture that acknowledges and appreciates people for the work that they do and gives them the opportunity to do it better. Otherwise, having a professional on the margins is a complete waste. You are simply gonna waste their time, frustrate them, and also inflict the same psychological stress upon yourself. In all of this workplace fiasco-ing there is no gainworthy scenario. Like this McKinsey blog explains:

Leaders can build psychological safety by creating the right climate, mindsets, and behaviors within their teams. In our experience, those who do this best act as catalysts, empowering and enabling other leaders on the team—even those with no formal authority—to help cultivate psychological safety by role modeling and reinforcing the behaviors they expect from the rest of the team.

So, the solution here is authenticity. Cultivating a sense of integral understanding of your colleagues and subordinates. And not just on a professional level but also on a human level. Global workplaces are now beginning to recognize people who make things move without actually holding titles. These are called midline change makers and they’re instrumental to the ongoing performance and overall success of any organization.

Any successful business that wants to take up high performance parameters like high job satisfaction for employees, high employee retention, high FTE ETC must try to develop workers such that they can benefit from any of the employee engagement and career development programs that the company has to offer.

 

Feeling TLDR? We don’t want you to drop off without getting all our great pointers for employee engagement? So, here’s a vid to capture the best bits in 60s secs or less.

 

2 Creating strong interpersonal ties

Key Takeaways:

• Developing small groups of strongly connected colleagues is a prime way of guaranteeing high-performance micro teams

• companies can use virtual coffee chat apps to foster micro-teens while also enabling them to break silos with inter-department communication and networking.

• High-performing micro teams plus inter-department networking have a strong chance to produce multifaceted managerial skills and even future business leaders.

Let’s be honest. While you may work with a team of anywhere between 3 to 300 people or maybe even more, you only actually connect on a personal level with a few of them. These strong interpersonal ties make all the difference in workplace satisfaction employee performance and overall career prospects.

One of the biggest demands that Gen Z employees are now making is for a peer-supported environment that contains people who are like them. They’re simply not interested in making the effort to artificially blend in with people for the sake of work. Rather, they want a workplace where they have genuine points of commonality and mutual interest. They can then further cultivate in the last thing relationships and career growth opportunities.

The same applies to workers of older generations although we certainly did not recognize this factor as clearly as we are doing now. The purpose of any employee engagement program and employee experience standard must be to foster strong interpersonal communication cooperation and development. Here is why:

Psychological safety is collective, meaning it has a cultural context; it is not an individual feeling, like belonging, which is a personal feeling. The group feels psychologically safe or does not, and if historically marginalized groups do not feel safe, likely the entire group does not feel safe. —Forbes

Recognizing that certain people work well with each other is the first step towards developing high-functioning work groups that can deliver performance beyond expectations. Fostering and nurturing these connections, particularly in an increasingly hybrid and remote working world, is of crucial value to businesses of all varieties.

Can employee engagement activities foster high-functioning micro Teams and groups?

Such organic interactions and high-performance groups are much more likely to emerge out of companies ‘ sponsored employee engagement programs. Some companies like to use dedicated employee engagement tools like virtual coffee chat apps or water cooler platforms to engage their workforces. And while manager-driven engagement like in water cooler chats is highly useful it is also important to let people interact organically.

Remote work is likely here to stay in some form, and psychological safety is critical for this environment, as working remotely often blurs the lines between an employee’s personal and professional life. – Business Insider

Generally speaking, this can take the form of a customized virtual coffee chat program where employees can have a random chat with a random person in their team and even with someone outside of their team who was part of the organization. Studies have shown that creating intra-team connections creates significant value for business operations by breaking down silos and creating agile workplace collaboration opportunities. The conventional wisdom of keeping people within their department is no longer up applicable because the world demands people with diverse skills that can weave in effective hands-on functional capacity as well as the ability to communicate and network with people from other departments.

Companies that develop a strong virtual coffee chat program within their employee engagement framework are highly likely to see super connectors changemakers quite contributors and other types of special employees emerging from the mold of the order.

3 Identifying company culture and employee engagement black spots

Key Takeaways:

• Driving employee engagement upward demands identifying low engagement areas and addressing them.

• Invigorating or otherwise removing low-enthusiasm employees increases the overall employee engagement and business value derivation from employee engagement activities.

• A balanced and fair approach in dealing with toxic employees also showcases that the administration genuinely cares about employee welfare even when they are disadvantaging the company.

The biggest reason why issues like workplace ghosting and quiet quitting plague business performance is that employees are dissatisfied. In fact, this is a very common theme in the modern corporate world where doing work has become easier but also more challenging thanks to AI. However, that is not translated to people finding value in their work and in fact, many have gone in the opposite direction.

With a dwindling career prospect, midlife obligations, and no opportunity to grow from within the organization, many employees simply give up. They put in as little effort as possible and will only show up to meetings or voluntary events for face value and job maintenance. These are quite quitters and coffee Badgers and they will take up needless space and money in your organization while giving very little to it in return. But the solution is not to simply remove employees with these kinds of behavioral tendencies. Rather the approach needs to revolve around motivating employees To find out the ones that are simply demotivated and the ones that are genuinely toxic.

A common way of identifying genuine workers from the pretenders is to foster workplace dialogue and networking opportunities. Building strong workplace communications is predicated on the ability to take initiative and interact with other people. Of course, you may accidentally recognize a quiet contributor for a malignant employee and fire the wrong person. That is why it is important to not take a hard-line approach but to let things unfold and judge both on the basis of organizational integrity metrics as well as employee performance metrics.

Now, faking interest in work is relatively easy when all you have to do is attend a meeting once a week. However, a regular employee engagement program that enables people to interact with each other across coworking teams as well as employees from other departments can reveal a whole lot more. Usually, people who are not interested in genuinely fostering connections generating better performance, and networking with peers outside of the effective operations are either quite quitters or toxic employees. And they will find ways to get out of a tough situation where they will have the potential general interest by faking some kind of a condition or otherwise obstruction that prevents them from actively taking part in your employee engagement program as well as a communication process.

Once such individuals are recognized they can be offered career development and professional networking opportunities to see if they are willing to genuinely invest in the company and grow their career through it. If nothing else the sheer desire to keep a job and add company-sponsored career development opportunities will help people put in the extra effort needed. For those who do not, the answer is obvious, and once it is clear that it is such management gain move on it with clarity.

Removing toxic employees or otherwise enabling low motivation and low-performing workers to do better sends a strong signal across the organization on the approach not the companies taking. This in fact, will then bolster your employee engagement efforts by either bringing low-motivation employees up to par with their regular colleagues and coworkers or otherwise removing them from the equation such that they do not prevent other people from actualizing their best potential.

Are you ready to Develop Organizational Efficiency Through Ensuring Psychological Safety at Your Business?

Creating organizational efficiency requires that your teams and department heads are working fulll swing. So, giving them what they need to accomplish their goals is paramount here. But what’s even more important is creating an environment of safety and trust that they can bank on. People are humans and humans makie mistakes. Along with other factors that impact your workers, these can add up to make holding jobs unbearable. To avoid this, you need a dedicated employee engagement platform like LEAD.bot.

LEAD.bot is a team engagement platform available on Slack and Teams. It is an all-in-one team development software with features like virtual coffee chats, buddy programs, birthday celebrations & work anniversary celebrations, new hire onboarding programs, and Pulse Surveys.

LEAD.bot also offers cutting-edge Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) for big enterprises and institutions. Executive to mid-level managers use ONA to gain highly actionable insights and build strong workplace connections. Using this app enables developing innovative employee engagement ideas to connect employees and foster better organizational health, employee retention, and overall performance with this simple app!

LEAD.bot is a product of LEAD.app and we also LEAD.bot’s sister app Sunrize which showcases workplace attendance by graphs right on Slack! Book a demo now!